31st Annual Presentation

The 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ceremony honors the best books of 2010

The 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes will be awarded April 29, 2011, in a ceremony at the Los Angeles Times building.

Stay tuned to this page for the February 22nd announcement of the 2010 Book Prizes Innovator’s Award Winner, Robert Kirsch Award Winner, and the 2010 category finalists.

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2009 WINNERS
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Biography

Long before photography was consumed by the digital age, talented men and women used their conventional cameras to tell stories that enriched, inspired and aroused America during times of war and peace. Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke White and Edward Steichen were among those who come to mind. But it was Dorothea Lange,an independent photographer and prestigious contributor to Life Magazine who truly enriched our knowledge of 20th Century history.

In this superbly-written biographical documentary Professor Linda Gordon says, “I have come to think of Lange as a photographer of democracy and for democracy.”

–2009 Biography Judges

Current Interest
  • Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (McSweeney’s Books)

Dave Eggers has written an extraordinary story of early 21st Century America, combining rigorous reporting with the kind of literary grace and attention to everyday detail that one finds in the best fiction. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-born New Orleans contractor, and his Baptist-raised wife Kathy survive Hurricane Katrina and its punishing aftermath only to run smack up against a harrowing demonstration of the cultural complexity that now informs American life. “It is only an account of one family’s experience before and after the storm,” writes Eggers. It is much, much more than that.

–2009 Current Interest Judges

Fiction

A courtship, long marriage, and then an agonizing death, becomes a heroic meditation on the unruly nature of love. The book alternates between past and present until two lives are fully seen. There’s no easy resolution here but rather an ennobling picture of lives lived over decades, in sickness and health, brought vibrantly to life.

–2009 Fiction Judges

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

With deep compassion, the lives of two boyhood friends and their families are stripped bare in this first novel set in a dying steel town in Pennsylvania. In the bucolic landscape where ruined factories are stark reminders of the lack of opportunities, Philipp Meyer charts the aspirations, the failures, and the moral dilemmas his characters face as they’re drawn into an ever-strangling morass of murder and the confusions of class as their abiding loyalties are tested.

–2009 First Fiction Judges

Graphic Novel

Mazzucchelli’s monolith is a beautifully executed love story, a smart and playful treatise on aesthetics, a perfectly unified work whose every formal element, down to the stitching on its spine, serves its themes. No wonder the main character is an architect finding his way back to his Ithaca and his Penelope: “Asterios Polyp” is an odyssey of design as well as writing and art and cartooning. Steeped in classicism and wholly modern, it’s a pleasure to read, and maybe even more of a pleasure to contemplate and discuss.

–2009 Graphic Novel Judges

With the Graphic Novel Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes becomes the first major book prize in the United States to honor publications in this category, which is an expanding part of the book landscape, both aesthetically and commercially.

History

With “Golden Dreams,” Kevin Starr has placed a majestic capstone on his monumental history of California. This is history at its most capacious and inclusive: beautifully written, panoramic in its viewpoint, keen in its insight. Starr skillfully connects civic, political and cultural trends, presents illuminating personalities, and to a remarkable extent sees his vast canvass whole: He is equally at home with Pat Brown as with Dave Brubeck, as familiar with the sun-splashed subdivisions outside San Diego as the rhythms of the beat culture in San Francisco and the electrifying jazz clubs of South Central Los Angeles. By capturing California as it came to define the American dream after World War II, Starr has displayed all of the possibilities, tensions and contradictions that defined America itself “in an age of abundance.” Without romanticizing this lost world, Starr shows how an earlier generation of Californians shaped their future with a creativity and confidence that now seems painfully beyond our reach.

–2009 History Judges

Mystery / Thriller

Stuart Neville’s stunning debut novel delivers an inspired, gritty view of violence’s aftermath and the toll it takes on each person involved – especially on one haunted, redemption-seeking ex-IRA hitman. Along the way, Neville condenses the fear and hate that has troubled Northern Ireland, still under the thumb of decades of domestic terrorism, for decades.

–2009 Mystery/Thriller Judges

Poetry

Brenda Hillman’s bold, experimental poetry charts a course into unexplored territory. In “Practical Water,” her commitment to innovation and interiority is galvanized by the need to speak back to the stark realities of our situation. Observing absurd sessions of Congress, advocating for the planet, speaking against the injustice of war, Hillman’s work looks outward as well as inward. In this, her finest book, she creates an urgent new poetry for our moment.

–2009 Poetry Judges

Science & Technology

The British physicist Paul Dirac was so famously taciturn — almost monosyllabic — that it seemed impossible that he would ever be the subject of a full-scale biography, much less one that wouldn’t require a PhD in physics to comprehend. Hiding inside himself, Dirac spoke to the world almost entirely through his papers. Freeman Dyson called them “exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky.” In “The Strangest Man,” Graham Farmelo has brought Dirac to life, showing how a quiet man with a damaged soul was able to deepen our understanding of physics.

–2009 Science & Technology Judges

Young Adult Literature

In a tightly focused narrative, Elizabeth Partridge chronicles the events of Martin Luther King’s historic march from Selma to Montgomery, shining a bright spotlight on some of its most important participants: children and teenagers. Their vivid and dramatic accounts are complemented by breathtaking photographs that, when woven into Partridge’s history, provide a sense of immediacy and provoke a sense of moral outrage.

–2009 Young Adult Literature Judges

2009 Innovator’s Award Winner
The Innovator’s Award recognizes the people and institutions that are doing cutting edge work to bring books, publishing and storytelling into the future, whether in terms of new business models, new technologies or new applications of narrative art.

Dave Eggers has always been an innovator. From his early days at Might Magazine – where he and his partners poked smart fun at the excesses of 1990s culture – to his ongoing work with McSweeney’s, the publishing house he runs in San Francisco, he has shown a refreshing disregard for conventional wisdom, whether it has to do with what he publishes, how he publishes or that he is a publisher at all. To be sure, publishing was not something he needed to do; his first book, the memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” became a bestseller upon its release in 2000 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Were Eggers another kind of writer, this might have been enough for him, but writing is just one of the things he does. In 1998, he founded the literary journal McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern; the success of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” allowed him to turn McSweeney’s into a full-fledged independent press, publishing writers from Stephen Dixon and Robert Coover to Lawrence Weschler, Art Spiegelman and William T. Vollmann. Eggers has not only built an editorial model to support these efforts, but a business model as well. What’s more, in an era when too many in the media seem to want to give up on print altogether, McSweeney’s books, along with their magazines and other publications, are beautiful: elaborately designed, a pleasure to hold and look at, a three-dimensional reading experience in the best sense of the word.

Equally important is Eggers’ involvement in 826 National, which he co-founded in 2002. These eight urban non-profit centers – including two in Los Angeles – are dedicated to fostering literacy in kids 6-18, and work with students on everything from homework to college essays, while encouraging them to produce books and anthologies. More to the point, they offer a place to gather, helping to create communities in which literature is not just important but fun.

Through it all, Dave Eggers continues to function as an inspirational role model, producing his own books – his latest, “Zeitoun,” is a finalist for this year’s Current Interest Book Prize – and other projects, including the screenplay for last year’s film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are.”

He is exactly the kind of person the Innovator’s Award is intended to honor: a forward thinker who is not afraid of print, but also not afraid to look ahead to the future, and who is drawing a new generation of writers and readers to the written word.

2009 Robert Kirsch Award Winner
Evan S. Connell has been recognized by readers, critics and scholars as an American original, “our most subversive writer,” a compassionate contrarian, the author of “fiction in extremis,” and a “gloriously insidious philosopher of our true heritage.” His novels, short stories, essays and poems range across centuries and continents, focusing sometimes on the great events of history and other times on the secret moments of a private life, and often both at once, but always conjuring up what has been aptly called a kind of “dangerous magic.”

Whether his eye falls on the Crusades, or the battle of Little Big Horn, or the more intimate conflicts that characterize a marriage and a family, Connell brings to bear on all of his subjects a penetrating insight that, as one critic puts it, “flips the known world on its head.” Now living in Santa Fe, he has journeyed in prose and poetry from Kansas City, Missouri, the setting of Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, perhaps his most celebrated works, to beaches of Carmel and all the way to Uttar Pradesh. In recognition of a distinguished body of work by a writer residing in or writing about the West, the Los Angeles Times presents Evan S. Connell with the 30th Robert Kirsch Award.

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2010 Award Presenters
Emcee:
Presenters:
  • Jim Newton / Biography
  • TBD / Current Interests
  • TBD / Fiction
  • Mark Danielewski / Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
  • Geoff Boucher / Graphic Novel Award
  • Reza Aslan / History
  • Attica Locke / Mystery-Thriller
  • David St. John / Poetry
  • TBD / Science and Technology
  • Cynthia Kadohata / Young Adult Literature
  • Jonathan Kirsch / Robert Kirsch Award
  • TBD / Innovator’s Award
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